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So, Jon Bon Jovi never wanted to relocate the Buffalo Bills to Toronto.

The things you learn listening to Howard Stern. Or should I say, the revisionist history you hear.

Here’s what really happened a few years ago, according to inside sources at the time, in the position to know.

The pop-rocker, you’ll recall, partnered first with MLSE chairman Larry Tanenbaum then with Edward Rogers of Rogers Communications Inc. in 2014 to bid on the NFL club, which went up for sale following the death in late March of founding owner Ralph Wilson.

Come September of that year, Terry and Kim Pegula far outbid some guy named Donald Trump as well as Bon Jovi’s so-called Toronto group — plus a never-disclosed mystery bidder, or two – and remain Bills owners to this day.

The original idea when Bon Jovi and Tanenbaum partnered up by 2013 was to buy an NFL team and relocate it to Toronto, preferably the Bills. Rogers, and before him his late father Ted, had had designs on bringing an NFL team (expansion or relocated) to Toronto as far as back as the 1990s.

Two weeks after Wilson died, I wrote that Bon Jovi’s interest in becoming an NFL owner not only was high, as confirmed by his publicist, but that sources confirmed earlier reports in Toronto and beyond that Bon Jovi and Tanenbaum together would bid on the Bills with the idea of relocating the club eventually to Toronto.

No one representing Bon Jovi or Tanenbaum ever reached out to me to correct that report, which I continued to cite week after week in Bills-sale stories.

In late April 2014, thanks to the legal analysis and assistance of a prominent east-coast-based pro-sports franchise relocation expert, I wrote that the Bills’ newly signed 10-year stadium lease and novel non-relocation agreement not only essentially prevented the club from being relocated before a brief, one-time out window in 2020 for a $28.4-million penalty, but those legal documents expressly stated that the Bills — without the approval of both the state of New York and Erie County — “shall not sell, assign or otherwise transfer the team to any person who, to the Bills’ knowledge, has an intention to relocate, transfer or otherwise move the team.”

Not only did some in the press dispute the report, but sources informed me Bon Jovi, Tanenbaum and their advisers had concluded my report was inaccurate – and outright dismissed the notion that the stadium lease and non-relocation agreement were serious obstacles for them.

Two months later, by the end of June, they came around to error of their interpretation.

By the first week of July, Bon Jovi began the process of flipping public perception regarding his bid group’s intentions. Although neither he, nor Tanenbaum, nor Rogers (once he joined to make it a trio by July) ever publicly stated an intention to relocate the Bills eventually to somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area, it was well known within Toronto.

And, crucially, Bills executives knew of that intention, too. There was no putting that genie back in the bottle.

When the bank and legal firm that conducted the Bills sale on behalf of the Wilson estate in early August 2014 at first refused to advance Bon Jovi’s group through to the second round of the bidding process – from initial, non-binding bids indicating a specific price range prior to seeing ‘the books’, to the final round of binding, specific bids — Bon Jovi fully understood that the issue of relocation, indeed, was an enormous issue and obstacle for his bid.

The estate’s transaction team not only insisted Bon Jovi’s group resubmit a higher indicative-bid range (they soon bumped it to $1.0 billion to $1.1 billion, from the original $800 million to $900 million) but insisted the group provide a more convincing assurance it would not eventually relocate the Bills to Canada.

In the end, the following was the best promise Bon Jovi and his deep-pocketed Canadian backers were willing to provide to the sellers. It’s the actual wording they used in their resubmitted indicative bid, which I first reported a month later:

“We remain committed to working collaboratively to finance and build a new stadium in the Buffalo area in order to develop a long-range stadium solution for the Buffalo fans and Buffalo community.

“After purchasing the team, we intend to work with the state, city, county, business community and the New Stadium Working Group to identify a site and develop a plan to finance and build a new stadium in Buffalo.”

It’s clever, subtly evasive language. Nowhere is there a promise not to move the club to Ontario. The trust and its transaction team immediately concluded as much, and demanded a more clearly expressed long-term commitment to Buffalo with Ontario rubbed out as any future relocation option.

The Bon Jovi group never provided one.

On Wednesday morning, Bon Jovi told Stern that a Trump “smear campaign” was to blame for Western New Yorkers believing his bid group planned to relocate the club to Toronto.

“It’s genius what he did,” Bon Jovi told Stern on his national satellite radio show, “because he was taking out a serious candidate to buy the team, and then hope that he would get it at a bargain price. But we were as real as real got and, you know, I’m broken-hearted because I would have loved it, and what we would’ve done in Western New York.

“And people don’t realize, I was really gonna get a house there, I was going to move there, I was really, seriously, changing my life.”

Maybe so. Maybe by the time August 2014 rolled around he really did have a complete change of heart, and meant to do all that.

But it wasn’t his original intention. Period. And he should finally own it, publicly.

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